Day 8 (Thursday, January 25):

I slept on the floor of Childress and Weinberg’s hotel room last night, until 7 a.m., when Childress left for the airport and I took over his bed. Weinberg had to leave a few hours later, and I went about my day.

Actually, before he left, Weinberg and I and several other press people sat around at press headquarters talking about the movies and what the pluses and minuses of the festival had been. It was a jovial, pleasant conversation, with people agreeing and disagreeing good-naturedly, the way professionals do. And then Robert Koehler from Variety showed up and started arguing with everyone, bluntly and tactlessly.

It’s one thing to disagree, of course. We’re critics; we often have strong opinions, and those opinions often differ from our colleagues’. But Koehler was abrasive about it. Perhaps he is defensive about the fact that, since Variety’s main purpose is to report on the business of movies and not on their artistic merit, no one cares what a Variety critic thinks.

After he was gone, I got into a conversation with a fellow writer about the BlackBerry a-holes (or BerryHoles, as my mom has taken to calling them). His position was that it’s OK to BlackBerry during a movie at Sundance! His reasoning was that these are press-and-industry screenings, which means they’re for work, not play, and that sometimes work must be done. People who represent studios that might want to buy these films may need to conduct business while the film is being screened.

I countered that if these screenings are business functions, why not go ahead and make phone calls during them, too? He said the BlackBerry is a concession, a way to find middle ground between making phone calls and doing nothing at all.

He has a point about the screenings being for work and not recreation, but I still see no reason why, if business must be conducted, a person couldn’t go out into the hall to conduct it. He said he never notices the light from BlackBerrys because he’s concentrating on the screen — and furthermore, if one does get distracted, it’s one’s own fault for allowing it to distract one.

It will not surprise you to learn that this individual is himself a BlackBerry user. He prefers it to pen and paper when it comes to note-taking. He said he always sits in the back corner of the theater, though, to avoid bothering anyone … which is very generous of him, considering it would be the person’s own fault if he or she were bothered.

Anyway, he seemed like a nice guy, and I lent him my pen so he could do the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. We disagree on the BerryHole issue, but we had common ground in other areas, e.g., that Bob Koehler is obnoxious.

My first screening of the day, which I saw with my new Rotten Tomatoes and Film Threat pals, was “King of California,” in which Michael Douglas plays a crazy guy who becomes convinced there is Spanish treasure buried beneath a Costco. Evan Rachel Wood plays his daughter, marking a rare non-slutty-teenager role for her. The film was not pleasing to us, but not for that reason.

Kim from Cinematical talked me into going to the Chinese buffet after that, even though it’s more expensive than it ought to be and even though the item I like best, sweet and sour chicken, is always in short supply. Nonetheless, when eateries are in short supply, and when time is of the essence, you do what you have to.

I saw “The Go-Getter” next, starring Lou Taylor Pucci (from “Thumbsucker”) as an Oregon teen who steals a car and goes on a road trip. We sure love Pucci and his co-star, Zooey Deschanel, but we sure got tired of this moody, introspective movie. Too much moping, not enough doin’ stuff — and too typical of an indie Sundance drama.

We were 0-for-2 so far today, but I had high hopes (that’s a pun; you’ll get it in a moment) for the films still on the agenda. Up next was “Smiley Face,” a Midnight section comedy about a pothead girl trying to get through a day while particularly stoned. Anna Faris plays the girl, and as viewers of the “Scary Movie” series can tell you, she’s a genuinely talented comedic actress. If someone would give her a truly great script, she could be a superstar.

“Smiley Face” is funny enough, probably more so if you have personal experience with marijuana and can relate to Faris’ behavior. One very interesting point: Her character is high for the ENTIRE film. It’s hard to sustain the audience’s attention for 90 minutes when the protagonist is in an altered state the whole time, but the movie does an OK job of it.

Everyone was tired today. There was some partying last night that went into the wee hours, and besides, we’ve been at this for a week. You could see people walking around with weak smiles on their faces, languidly shuffling from one screening to another. You could also overhear a lot of cell phone conversations between festival-goers and their travel agents/secretaries/editors, trying to bump up their flight plans. Even when you’re having a good time, all the commotion, not to mention the emotional roller-coaster of seeing four or five movies a day, can take its toll.

I had a break after “Smiley Face,” and I took advantage of something I’d discovered earlier in the week. The Yarrow has wifi available in the lobby if you pay $7 for it — or, alternatively, if you befriend someone who has paid $7 for it and that person tells you the password. Woo-hoo!

My final film of the night was “The Ten,” another Midnight selection (screening at 10:30, thank goodness). You may recall that earlier, I heard someone say it was one of the worst things she’d ever seen. Turns out my suspicions were correct: She just didn’t get it. Or, more fairly, perhaps it just wasn’t her kind of humor. It’s definitely absurd, surreal, and silly, with things as sophisticated as wordplay and things as lowbrow as flowers growing out of rhino poop.

It’s basically a series of sketches, each one related to one of the Ten Commandments. Some of the characters recur, and there’s a storyteller (Paul Rudd) who introduces each one and who winds up being the subject of the adultery story. The “don’t steal” story has Winona Ryder falling in love with a ventriloquist’s dummy and stealing it. For “don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff,” a suburban husband gets jealous when his neighbor buys a CAT-scan machine, so he buys one for himself. For “keep the sabbath holy,” a guy doesn’t feel like going to church, so he fakes illness to his wife and runs around the house naked for three hours, eventually inviting all his friends to come over and do the same. And so on. Goofy, goofy stuff.

That was the end of the day for me, and my eyes were a-droopin’ as I drove to Salt Lake, where I crashed at a friend’s house. Or where I slept, that is. No crashing, fortunately.